Happy Pi Sword Nerds!
To help you celebrate, here are some pies you can make at home, and a very special crustless version!
Peter found this recipe on the British Museum's blog:
Mushroom Pasties/Hand-pies (vegetarian, can be made vegan)
Mushrooms of one night are the best, if they are small, red inside, and closed at the top: and they should be peeled and then washed in hot water and parboiled, and if you wish to put them in a pasty add oil, cheese and spice powder.
This recipe is from the Medieval household book Le MΓ©nagier de Paris (the Goodman of Paris). At home it is likely that the fictional narrator of the book, who kept a well-furnished table, would serve a large double-crust pasty or plate pie – but on his journeys to and from the farm, small ones probably seemed more suitable.
Serves 6
Ingredients
• 450g home-made or bought shortcrust pastry, thawed if frozen
• 450g button mushrooms
• Pinch of salt
• 2 tbsp olive oil
• 50g Cheddar cheese, grated
• 1⁄2 tsp salt
• 1⁄8 tsp freshly ground black pepper
• 1⁄4 tsp dry mustard powder
• 1 egg, beaten
To make this recipe vegan use vegan pastry, omit the cheese or use vegan cheese, and use soy, rice or almond milk instead of the egg to seal the pastry.
Method
Use two-thirds of the pastry to line small, deep pans. Chill while making the filling. Preheat the oven to 200°C. Trim off and discard the bottoms of the mushroom stems, then dip the mushrooms in boiling salted water, holding them in a sieve. Drain them, pat dry, then chop or slice them. Put them in a bowl and mix them with the oil, cheese and seasonings. Fill the mixture into the pastry cases. Roll out the remaining pastry and use it to make lids for the pasties. Seal the lids with beaten egg. Decorate the tops with pastry trimmings and brush with the remaining egg. Make a small crosscut in the centre of each lid.
Bake the little pies in the oven for 15–18 minutes. Serve warm.
Kat’s Own Apple Pie
This recipe can be made vegan by substituting out the butter for vegetable shortening or vegan butter.
Crust Ingredients:
- 2 cups all purpose flour
- 2 sticks of unsalted butter (8 tablespoons)
- 2-3 tablespoons ice water
- Pinch of salt
Filling Ingredients:
- 2-3 large apples (I prefer using tart apples, but you can use your favorite)
- Juice and zest from 1 lemon
- 2-3 tablespoons of sugar
- 1-2 teaspoons of cinnamon
- ½ teaspoon fresh ground nutmeg
- 2 teaspoons cornstarch
Directions:
Begin by making the crust: place the flour and salt in a food processor and pulse a few times to combine. Cut the butter into small chunks and add to the food processor. Pulse until the mixture resembles small pebbles or coarse sand. Add the ice water by sprinkling with a spoon or spraying with a misting spray bottle (this is the best!) and pulsing a few times after each addition of water. Do this until the dough just barely comes together, i.e. you can pinch the dough and it sticks together. Try not to run the mix in the processor too much as the butter will start to get too warm!
Turn the tough out of the processor and into a zip top bag. Shape the dough into a disk and rest in the fridge for about an hour.
Note: if you don’t have a food processor, you can make the dough by hand. Rub the butter and flour mixture between your fingers until you achieve the pebble consistency. Add the water a little at a time while working the dough with your fingers. Finish the same way as above.
While the dough rests, make the filling: zest and squeeze the lemon. Add the lemon juice to a large bowl. Peel and slice the apples (thinner slices if you want a softer filling, thicker slices if you want a crunchier filling). Add them to the bowl of lemon juice, and fill with cold water until the slices are just covered.
After the dough has rested, remove from the fridge and divide in half. Keep one half in the fridge while you work with the other half. Sprinkle your work surface and rolling pin with flour, and roll out the first half of the dough until it is about ¼ inch thick. Transfer to a pie pan; press the dough gently into all corners without squashing it, and let the excess dough overhang the edge. Take a fork and stipple the bottle (poke it a bunch with the fork to make tiny holes all over!). Place in the fridge.
Drain your apples and mix in the sugar, cornstarch, cinnamon, and nutmeg. The apples should be coated with sugar mixture, so add less or more sugar and cinnamon depending on the quantity of apple slices. Add in the reserved lemon zest. Place the apple mixture into the prepared pie pan and keep in the fridge while you roll out the other half of the dough.
Preheat your oven to 375F.
Roll the dough until about ¼ inch thick, and then place on the top of the filled pie pan. Seal the edges with your preferred method (I like taking the overhanging bottom crust and rolling it up over the excess top crust, then twisting and crimping around the edge until I have a pretty and rustic crimp pattern. My mom always just mashed it with the stippling fork, and it also looked gorgeous, so you do you!). Cut a vent in the top crust by making a small X in the middle and peeling back the tips.
Cut aluminum foil into 1-inch strips and cover the crimped crust. Place in the oven and bake for 50 minutes. After 50 minutes, check to see if the filling is bubbling (you can look at the vent and see). If not bubbling, bake for 10 more minutes and check again. Once the filling is bubbling, remove the aluminum foil from the crust and egg wash the entire top. Bake for an additional 10 minutes or until you get a nice golden brown color.
Let the pie cool completely before eating. No really, let it cool down! The filling will thicken as it cools, so you don’t want to slice it too soon or you’ll have a runny slice of pie. Pair with vanilla ice cream or whipped topping, and enjoy!
Dr. Josh Wickman presents
"A Crustless Option"
The pies presented so far can be made using ingredients found in your kitchen or your local grocery store. But in the immortal words of Carl Sagan: “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”
As it happens, the universe has recipes for at least 3 different flavors: π 0, π +, and π – . These symbols refer to particles known to physicists as pi mesons, or pions.
Mesons are one of two main categories of hadrons: particles which interact via the strong nuclear force. Hadrons are made up of quarks, and due to the principles of quantum chromodynamics (QCD), the quarks can be arranged in groups of two or three. The latter are called baryons, which include the proton and the neutron, as well as many more exotic particles. The former are mesons.
As far as we know, there are six flavors of quark. Pions are made up of the two most basic, lowest-mass flavors, known as the up (u) and down (d) quarks. QCD also demands that mesons come in pairs of one “particle” and one “antiparticle” (the antimatter counterpart of the ordinary particle). This means pions also must contain anti-up (u) and anti-down (d) quarks. (The traditional notation for an antiparticle is an overline, but since overlines don’t always show up on the web, we’ll use an underline.) There are four pairwise combinations of these particles: uu, dd, ud, and du .
These combinations can be distinguished by their electric charge. If q is the magnitude of the electron’s charge but positive, then the up and down quarks have electric charge values of ⅔q and –⅓q, respectively. Their antiparticles have the same magnitudes with reversed polarity, –⅔q for anti-up and ⅓q for anti-down. Pairing these off, we get the following:
Generally, the first two are indistinguishable in experiments: they are both electrically neutral, and they lack other quantum properties that could set them apart. So these are two varieties of the neutral pi meson, π 0 . The third has net-positive electric charge, making it the π + , and likewise the fourth is the π – .
Just as quarks have antiparticles, so too do mesons. For a composite particle like a hadron, the antiparticle is just the combination of the antiparticles of all of the original constituents. If we try this with the quark pairs making up pions, we find that the π – is the antiparticle of the π + , and vice versa. Interestingly, the π 0 is its own antiparticle!